SOURCE: “Love, Comedia Style,” in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1982, pp. 47-60.

[In the following essay, Wade discusses how priests and other officials of the church wrote erotic Spanish comedies during the Golden Age in spite of the fact that moralists of the time opposed the subject.]

The “aesthetics of the folk”¹ have determined not entirely but in large part the nature and content of literature. Thus when the folk affirm that all the world loves a lover, that the course of true love never runs smooth, or that love makes the world go ’round, the aphorisms, like those of similar nature, help to make understandable the inevitable recurrence of the love motif in much of the world's literature. Although this motif may be, and often is, treated seriously—and also tragically—² it is more usually, in what may be termed its surface treatment, given a comic texture. As stated by Benjamin Lehman,³ comedy meets a need, and this in every age. It uses its accustomed devices to beget emotions, usually but not always mirthful, through the actions and utterances of the characters of a play or novel or short story, and this even though all comedy, including farce, is at bottom essentially serious. It is serious because it affords a more or less pleasing vision of reality that the average person takes for granted, and it makes an affirmation about life that corresponds with the vision of most of us that this is the way things are. It includes the feeling that we like to keep things agreeable, free from the threat of time and disruption. The ideology of the dramatists who composed Spain's Golden Age comedy reveals something of this vision. The result, in keeping with the first two sentences of this article, is drama of a comic type often constructed about the love of a boy and a girl, and the dramatic action has to do with their efforts to achieve a successful union by overcoming the obstacles placed in their way. Having for a brief time distorted the societal fabric by their resistence to the obstacles that work to prevent their union, the fabric is restored when they succeed. The audience will know that the first bliss of young love will not last forever, but this is of little consequence within the confines of the play, since the post-marital fortunes of the lovers are seldom included in it. The lovers are youthful, charming, and compelled toward their destiny, their physical oneness. This biological urge, this mating instinct, may be treated as comic and not as morally offensive for most of us. Indeed, it delights us; it is recognized as Nature's provision for the perpetuation of the human race, a consummation, again for most of us, not to be deplored. As Lehman suggests (p. 166), the carnival of ancient comedy thus persists, as does the sense of the ancient fertility rite.

The love portrayed in the Comedia, as has often been remarked, is usually quite physical. Two young people meet, assess each other's eligibility for mating, and there is instant love—the Comedia often tells us that love enters through the eyes and ears. There is little of what might be called the spiritual element of the lovers' mutual attraction; the psychological ingredients of their passion seldom receive more than a limited explication by the author.⁴ For the sake of decorum, or because they had not been invented, the author usually but not always, avoids terms common in our time that are often applied by psychologists to love, its physical aspects and accompanying emotional states. There is no reason to believe that the Comedia's audiences found less comprehensible an author's euphemisms rather than the blunter terms now used by psychologists, terms in our late 20th century so common as to appear in the news media.

Now the most intimate element of love-making, the sexual union of the lovers to be consummated soon after the final lines of the play, was looked upon by Spain's seventeenth-century moralists as sinful. Dominated by the Judeo-Christian ethic that had evolved through the centuries, society considered the sex act as an evil, one indeed that had to be endured by moralists and theologians but only grudgingly. The mutual attraction of the sexes in a Comedia was excoriated by those enemies of the theater throughout the century.⁵ It is not possible to say with assurance when and why the belief that sexual indulgence is sinful originated, but one may reasonably assume that its evil repute grew from the abuse of the sexual union for pleasure, and this evil repute probably began not very long after man became man.⁶ In any event, the Judeo-Christian concept of the sex act for Western peoples has been that it is an evil in itself. But despite this, sexual materials have served throughout the history of literature as titillating subject matter, and have provided a favored theme for the folk.

The Comedia, as students of the genre recall, was subject to censorship. The censor was required to attest that the play to which he gave approval contained nothing inimical to the Christian faith or doctrine. Thus the authors of the Comedia would seem to be required in principle to accept belief in the evil of the sexual act and that a play's subject matter that approved of it directly or by indirection was an attack on the faith. But despite this, the censorship accepted the genre's exploitation of the often used boy-meets-girl situation with its accompanying inference that the sexual union of the lovers would be morally and ecclesiastically permissible. This seeming paradox in the thinking of the dramatists and their audiences, as also that of the Church, had a partial and apparently, for them, a reassuring explanation in the conviction that the consummation of the lovers' affection was to be made acceptable by the churchly sacrament of marriage. This sacrament is of course still considered necessary and efficacious by orthodox Jews and Christians.

And so the Spanish folk, as those of other cultures, have through many centuries found their literature, as that of the Comedia, responsive to their felt need for the portrayal of their sexual impulses. The result is the inevitable note of eroticism that comedy more often than not took on in Golden Age drama. Using the standard definition, eroticism is an equivalent term for sexual excitement, and erotic materials of any sort are those that tend to incite genital stimulation. It follows that a person's fantasies and day dreams involving the subject of his or her sexual desire are erotic, and this element is always present in the boy-meets-girl situation so frequent in comedy. It is obvious that nothing in itself is erotic; that it becomes so in proportion as an individual's fantasies make it so.

There is thus in order the analysis of any comedia that has to do with a boy-meets-girl motif, and of the way in which the author manipulates his materials effectively to make them inoffensively acceptable to his popular audience. It is apparent that in his effort to arouse gential excitement in the persons of his audience, the author has their collaboration as “co-authors” with him; they exercise this activity more or less in proportion as the author's words and the actors' execution of their roles stimulate their erotic fantasies. Some authors used erotic materials more forthrightly than the decorum of other authors permitted. This matter has had comment in at least four recent articles by specialists in the Comedia.

The first of these was Professor R. R. MacCurdy's “The Bathing Nude in Golden Age Drama,” an article that documented its title through pertient passages and references in a number of plays.⁷ MacCurdy found Rojas to be the most frequent user of the bathing nude as a strip-tease device to titillate his audience. The emotions aroused in the audience are labeled as “lust,” that is, an excessive sexual craving, in the usual definition of the term. (One observes that whereas “lust” denotes a moralistic attitude, eroticism does not have to imply a moralistic tone.) The second of the two articles, Sturgis Leavitt's “The Strip-Tease in Golden Age Drama,” added to MacCurdy's study, and agreed that Rojas more than any other dramatist employed the device. The author also suggested that Tirso was the most parsimonious of the playwrights in his use of the strip-tease topos. Leavitt differed in his manner of approach from MacCurdy; the former employed a tone of banter with a linguistic style appropriate to that tone. He labeled the strip-tease as good fun and had little sympathy for the moralists who were offended by it. Quite correctly he pointed out that the device, in comparison with modern nudity on the stage and in the cinema is relatively decorous.⁸ Neither of the two authors chose to see the sexual topoi that suffuse the Comedia as an expression of the aesthetic proposed in the present article, an expression that did its part in making of Golden Age drama a major component of much of the world's literature.

The third of the articles is that by Professor Mariano Pallarés Navarro, “Algunos aspectos sexuales en tres obras de Tirso de Molina.”⁹ Pallarés discusses some of the sexual and erotic elements in El burlador de Sevilla, El vergonzoso en palacio and Don Gil de las calzas verdes. Following an introductory explanation of the social background of Tirso's time, the author describes the erotic content of the three plays named. He gives the terms and quotes passages for some of them that are of erotic content; all of them would come under the label of “deshonestidad,” a term often used by those who decried the Comedia. The terms are “sexual,” “erótico,” “pasión,” “gozar” (to enjoy the sex act), “amor carnal,” “atracción física,” “lograr la belleza” (i.e. of the admired female), “impulso [sexual] arrollador”, “natural” (as applied to amorous passion), “desear,” “apetito natural,” “relación carnal,” “capacidad sexual,” “llamas tiranas [de amor].” Two terms of a sexual connotation that are used in one or another of the plays are “homosexualismo” and “hermafrodita.” There are also terms of double meaning with sexual insinuations, and the overall lesson objected to by the moralists is that if love cannot be achieved by licit means, any stratagem that may work is acceptable. The punishment for violating the moral code (except for Don Juan) is negligible, if there is any at all, and the lesson is clear that Tirso's attitude toward the objections of the moralists to his sexualized comedies is that their opinion is of minor concern for him.

The fourth article is one of broader scope, a rather thorough study of the love element in Tirso's plays. The author is Professor Jaime Asensio, and the title of his study is “Casos de amor en la comedia de Tirso de Molina.”¹⁰ His theory of the Tirsian love concept—love is the Mercedarian's favored theme—was determined by the reading of thirty-eight plays. Asensio does not hesitate to affirm that the same concept obtains in most of the plays of the Golden Age.

Professor Asensio's article is deserving of more space than it can be given here. The nexus of his study is that the debased love concept made clear in Tirso's comedias—a concept that permeated all of society—had replaced the earlier and noble neo-Platonic idea of love about which the individual and society could construct a sense of order in the universe.¹¹ The debased concept made clear by Tirso's plays led to disorder. Thus Asensio sees Tirsian love as “enredo,” “engaño,” and hence “desorden.” But when on page 19 he affirms that the Mercedarian's love concept is not a discovery of sensuality, he falls into a contradiction, since elsewhere (pages 9, 11, 24-27, 30-31), he accepts the erotic as a major component of the Tirsian formula. For Asensio Tirsian love is evil, and the problem takes on for him an approach he labels the Leibnitzian periculum-salvatio solution. This proposes that an evil person can be saved from his soul's peril only by the grace of God. Asensio blames the rejection of the neo-Platonic idea of love on the Church: through the doctrines formulated by the Council of Trent, Spanish Catholicism repudiated neo-Platonism because of this philosophy's pagan origin. This philosophy had been replaced by the idea that the individual should make his own decisions about good and evil. But since the individual of Tirso's time was incapable of making the difficult decisions affecting his spiritual wellbeing, he fell into error,¹² disillusionment and indecision, the desengaño of the “edad conflictiva.”¹³

Asensio sees that the love life of a character of the Comedia is pursued under a social aegis that sanctions his actions. Hence for Asensio society was corrupt, a theory accepted as fact by students of the Golden Age. He adopts the thesis of J. A. Maravall that the Comedia supports the power structure of the time. Indeed, he goes so far, in a kind of extension of the Maravall thesis, as to suggest that it was not really life that disillusioned society and the individual; rather, it was the artifice of the Comedia, itself an engaño. One presumes that he means that the theater was only, as Aristotle proposed, an “imitation of an action.” I find it hard to put the blame of the period's corruption in thought and action only on the Comedia, even though its influence was not small. I should feel obligated to think that the answer to the dilemma is that the authors of the drama reproduced most of the major aspects of their culture, but they also introduced other factors that offered new insights as part of their creative process.

And so we see that eroticism permeated the Comedia, as stated by the authors named above. The generalization is especially true for the boy-meets-girl kind of plot. To repeat, eroticism is sexual excitement, and erotic materials are those that excite genital stimulation. The process of excitement is originated by the day-dream fantasies of the individual concerned.

And thus we come to the point at issue, that is, the extent to which it may be shown in detail how the love of the Comedia depends directly on the topos of eroticism as this is observed in the psychological exploitation of that emotion's elements in a boy-meets-girl comedia. To explore the matter there is needed a comedia that comes close to perfection in its demonstration of the thesis concerned. There are many plays that might be recalled, but the one that seems to me to fulfill most adequately the conditions required is Tirso's La celosa de sí misma. It is in this play that the erotic fantasies of the primer galán are so clearly—and amusingly—evident. The play, as it turns out, is not of the mujer disfrazada de hombre theme, and to most students of the Comedia is less well-known than others of Tirso's canon. But the action moves rapidly and is expertly manipulated for maximum audience reaction. The plot is intricate and its summary in a brief form is difficult. It will be necessary to omit those elements of the action that do not offer a direct contribution to the elucidation of the theme at hand. As occasion warrants, there will be comments to help make evident the action's erotic nature. The text of the play is that of Blanca de los Rís, Tirso de Molina. Obras dramáticas completas, 2 (Madrid: Aguilar, 1952), 1441-92.

As the play opens, don Melchor, a youthful Leonese, has just arrived in Madrid accompanied by his lacayo Ventura. Don Melchor, noble by birth but financially less than affluent, has come to meet in her home the girl to whom he has tentatively been affianced through an arrangement made by relatives. She will have a handsome dowry. She is also reportedly beautiful, and Melchor makes clear to the audience that this beauty must be a part of the girl's endowments if she is to meet his approval. It is apparent that Melchor, surely knowledgeable about women as a youth of his time must be in a day when the don Juan ideal of machismo applied to all young gentlemen worthy of the label, carries within him fantasies that are erotic: in his imagination he can picture the physical allurements that he hopes will be obvious as he first sees his bride-to-be.

It is a festal day and Melchor decides to attend mass before repairing to the home of his fianceé. The mass is to be heard in the nearby convent of the Victoria, a favored place for young people to congregate to see others of the opposite sex. Melchor is warned by the shrewd Ventura to watch out for city slickers and golddiggers, notoriously on the prowl for victims in this cosmopolitan and wicked metropolis.¹⁴ Ventura offers a wager that before Melchor has a chance to meet his affianced, he will become the victim of a designing female. Melchor scoffs at the idea.

Melchor and Ventura hear mass, the latter in a nearby church. When they come together again, the former excitedly tells the lacayo that he had worshipped by the side of a beautiful female, and Ventura recalls his prediction of his master's victimization by a designing woman. He is aghast when the galán states that of the lady's person he had seen only a hand, but that this was so divinely formed that it is surely indicative of the beauty of her entire person. (The hand is of course a fetish, and will remain so throughout the play. Melchor's erotic fancies are already working at full speed.)¹⁵ When the lady appears, Melchor addresses her in the exaggerated love language of the Comedia. At first opposed to his advances, the lady softens and agrees to meet him here on the following day. Of her person Melchor has seen no more than her hand: the lady is clothed in the fashion of the day with her entire person concealed.¹⁶

The scene shifts to the home of don Alonso, the father of the girl Melchor has come to see as his intended bride. This is Magdalena, and she appears changing her clothes. (It is this scene from Tirso that Leavitt recalled in his article on the strip-tease.) She tells her maid Quiñones of the handsome stranger she had seen a while ago at the Victoria convent, and she hopes that her intended husband may be as personable. Magdalena is of course the convent lady, and it is apparent that she has seen in him, the stranger, a husband, the head of her family and the father of her children; this although she may be only partly conscious of this train of thought. When Melchor appears, Magdalena is overjoyed in seeing her hope come true. But Melchor finds her unattractive; he is still bedeviled by the fantasized perfection of the lady at the convent. Magdalena, seeing that he is not attracted to her, is saddened, and is beginning to feel jealous of herself, as the play's title has it.

At the beginning of Act II Magdalena and Melchor met at the convent entrance. She is dressed in all-concealing mourning garb so as to keep her identity secret, but to him she shows her hand for identification. She tells him that she knows Magdalena, and she reproaches him for his fickleness yesterday: even though he was Magdalena's husband-to-be, he had told her, the convent lady, that he loved her. Melchor assures her of his love, and affirms his intention of renouncing Magdalena. Magdalena, on his insistence, now shows him one eye; this may be taken as a mild form of strip-tease. She then shows him the other eye: more strip-tease. As will be learned later, her eyes are black, a fact that Ventura observes but Melchor does not. Verily, as Shakespeare and others have told us, love is blind. Or perhaps, as St. Augustine expressed it in his “amabam amare,” Melchor is in love with love. (The suggestion comes from de Rougemont, of reference in note 2.)

It turns out that Angela, one of Magdalena's friends, has seen Melchor, and determines to capture him.¹⁷ By bribing Ventura, Angela discovers the details of the Melchor-Magdalena-convent lady situation. In the meantime, don Alonso, having learned of Melchor's involvement with the lady of the convent, becomes upset enough to reproach Melchor for his deceitful actions. Magdalena tells him that her father has arranged another marriage for her and leaves him. Disconsolate, Melchor determines to return home to León.

As Act III begins, Melchor is making preparation for the homeward journey, but receives a message to come to the convent. He goes there with Ventura, and finds Angela. She is dressed in mourning, posing as the convent lady. Urged to disclose an eye, she does so. Ventura exclaims that the eye is blue, and that yesterday's eye was black. Melchor refuses to believe this. Magdalena enters in mourning garb. She and Angela, each claiming to be the one Melchor loves, throw him into confusion. (Is Tirso hinting here that this is the function of the feminine sex?) Each girl agrees to expose a hand so Melchor may decide who is who, but when the brothers of the girls appear, the latter leave hurriedly, fearing recognition.

Melchor is told by a messenger to appear tonight to talk with the lady he loves at a window. He is, however, to come to Magdalena's window in order, says the messenger, that the lady's relatives may not discover what she is doing. Magdalena is not to be told of this in advance. Melchor shows up at the window, and is addressed by Magdalena in the role of the convent lady. She tells him that she can not go through with the marriage with Melchor because of family reasons, and she hopes he will marry Magdalena, her dear friend. Magdalena as the convent lady now draws back from the window, and reappears at once as herself. She tells him that because of his fickleness, she wants nothing from him. Don Alonso, having heard that a man is at Magdalena's window, comes into the street to investigate. Angela also appears, claims to be the promised bride, the lady at the convent. But Magdalena joins them in the street and in the ensuing conversation, everything is cleared up. Melchor, contrite, confesses his errors, and is accepted by Magdalena as her fiancé. Other marriages are arranged for the minor characters, and all ends as the Comedia of comic structure usually does.

The matter-of-fact recital of the play's action gives small indication of its exuberance and verve, its great store of vitality. There are frequent specimens of the author's characteristic humor, much of it expressed through Ventura's wit as he coins words, satirizes culto language, mocks his master's stupidity at not seeing the obvious in the fact that the women he pursues (or is pursued by) are one person. A part of what Tirso's audience found “spicy” are the homosexual hints on doña Blanca's pages 1476-77 and 1487-88; the inferences were meant to add to a feeling of naughtiness that enhanced audience response.¹⁸ There is, however, a lack of the scatology found at times in Tirsian drama. There is no stage direction proposing how any one of the actors should do this or that scene, and it was up to the audience to respond adequately to whatever the actors gave them as the latters' interpretation of their roles. Physical decorum was apparently observed carefully; there is no indication that Melchor touched Magdalena except when he kissed her hand at the window. Thus the audience was required to use its imagination and fantasies in order to comprehend the situation, the basic eroticism. There can be no doubt that its members understood adequately what was going on. What it was that they missed that has been added by the psychologists in their study of eroticism is a matter not to be discussed here.

La celosa is a situation comedy, a “sitcom” somewhat like that of our modern theater. For this type of drama there is needed a series of actions that first of all lend themselves to a comic treatment. The erotic love theme has always been useful for this. Development of character is of minor concern. One searches in vain for a word or phrase that may tell us directly what any one of the persons is really like inside. They are types. Except for the servants, all are of the upper class, not particularly intelligent, and Melchor least of all. They are of “pure blood,” and with the keen sense of personal honor to be found to an exaggerated degree in the Comedia. The men are presumably virile, although Tirso's treatment of the male in many of his plays may make one doubt this. The ladies are physically attractive, virtuous and discretas, this last term meaning that they have enough common sense to behave in a way befitting their sex and social position. In the final analysis a genteel or noble lady's worth as a candidate for marriage depended first of all on her virginal virtue, and next on the size of her dowry. Her beauty was an added element to be desired but not necessarily required. Hence Melchor's placing beauty first as his lady's most desirable trait was unrealistic for the ideas of the time. But the autores of the boy-meets-girl type of comedy usually saw to it that a sufficient degree of physical attractiveness was present in their nubile ladies to stimulate the erotic fantasies of their suitors and hence of the play's audience. And thus it has been in much of the world's literature, written to fill a folk need since literature's beginning.

Spain's seventeenth-century drama was sufficiently popular to meet that folk need, this being first of all concerned with a desire for entertainment.¹⁹ A modern student who is beginning his study of the Comedia may be surprised to learn that churchmen formed part of the public that took pleasure in the drama, whether this be of a profane or of a religious nature. As observed in note 5, the Church supported the theater partly because of the latter's contributions to the hospitals, and as a consequence the Church gave to the acting profession a degree of respectability. Priests attended dramatic performances; they sat in a section reserved for them called a desván or tertulia. A picture of the section may be seen opposite page 193 in José Deleitó's book on the ways in which the public amused itself.²⁰ Deleitó (p. 285) remarks on the ease with which “lo eclesiástico y lo teatral” had “extrañas conexiones,” and adds (p. 286), “Nada más frecuente que el tránsito de la iglesia al Teatro y de la escena al claustro.” He goes on to relate how there were priests who renounced their calling to become actors. Some of them married. But there were also actors who took holy orders, just as there were dramatists like Lope, Mira, Moreto, Alonso Remón, Calderón—and of course Tirso—who did likewise.²¹ One reason for the compatibility of Church and Theater was the latter's origin in the church in medieval times: priests acted in skits of religious content, written in Latin. Gradually this kind of drama went to the vernacular, became more worldly, and eventuated in the commercial theater.²² But the compatibility of Church and Theater persisted despite this worldliness, and in Tirso's time both institutions had sympathy for each other.

It may be assumed that the distinction between what was morally acceptable and what was not was less sharply distinguished in the public—and the priestly—mind than we should expect to find in our own time. The seventeenth century was a difficult one for intellectuals. The dramatists were of course of that small and elitist group one of whose activities and functions was to seek freedom for the exploration and the exploitation of new areas such as the Lopean Comedia. Inhibited by the moral and theological absolutes of the Counter-Reformation—absolutes officially supported by the Church and State—the Establishment—intellectuals had to be careful not to go too far in their pursuit of new areas and ideas. As remarked above, the Comedia has been labeled by Maravall and Asensio as propaganda for the Establishment.²³ This charge cannot be refuted, although the Comedia was more than that. Nor should it be rejected out of hand, since one (even though only one) of the major functions of literature is to set down aspects and interpretations of its period's culture and thus to express the folk needs, as heretofore proposed. Among other things, literature is usually fashionable, and it was a fashion of the Establishment to support the theater. The Comedia was a favorite diversion of the young Felipe IV. Furthermore, the king was exaggeratedly fond of the other sex, and his erotic impulses helped to encourage the eroticism that was also fashionable in the culture. To find it in the theater, then, was not necessarily to be considered as deplorable, and this because of the fact (or in spite of it?) that the Establishment was, so to speak, playing both sides of the street: as seen, it supported on the one hand the cultural imperative of the Counter Reformation and, on the other, it fostered a theater (not to mention other institutions, such as prostitution) that undermined the moral code.²⁴ Theological doctrine has always had difficulties in its adoption, as our time so well illustrates.

To sum up, this article has assumed that literature is written to meet the folk needs of each generation. A major part of literature has been given over to the portrayal and interpretation of human love. This fits in well with the theory that reality is fundamentally comic rather than tragic. Since much of love is sexual in its nature, eroticism (that is, sexual excitement, originating in or accompanied by genital stimulation) is a necessary ingredient of the literary formula for the portrayal of love, especially so when this is concerned with the youthful emotions of the boy-meets-girl situation of comedy. The Spanish comedy of the Golden Age was more often than not given to this type of comedy and with the accompanying eroticism. This element survived in spite of the opposition of moralists, who saw in the erotic theater an evil that was forbidden by the Church of the Counter Reformation. The hand-in-glove compatibility of the Church and the Theater was explained in part by the fact of the origin of the Theater in the medieval Church, as also by the approval of the Establishment. Priests and other churchly people wrote erotic plays, apparently with no major twinge of conscience; they took pleasure in entertaining their audiences with the relatively decorous exploration of the complex of young love. The erotic element of youthful affection was made quite clear in Tirso's La celosa de sí misma as Melchor the galán exercised his sexual fantasies and day dreams as these were inspired by the mysterious lady he met at mass. The fundamental appeal of the boy-meets-girl theme is still of course very popular.²⁵

ADDENDA

After this study had been completed there came to hand an article that had escaped my attention, Francisco Ayala's, “Erotismo y juego teatral en Tirso,” in Insula, 19:214 (septiembre 1964), 1, 7. Ayala had just reread El vergonzoso en palacio and he recalls how Tirso had reprinted the play in the Cigarral primero of the Cigarrales de Toledo; this printing had come after a number of years during which the play had become famous in Spain, Italy and America—or so Tirso states. Following its presentation in the cigarral, members of the smart set who were present—Tirso refers to them as “el más bello y ilustre auditorio que dio estimación al Taxo y sobervia a sus aguas”—discussed the play's merit and demerits as dramatic art. The only criticism of a major sort was that of the play's violation of the classic unities, although there was not a consensus about it. No remark was made about the eroticism which Ayala found as making up much of the comedia's substance, although one of those present deplored Tirso's making wantons of the two daughters of the Duke of Aveiro. Apparently the Toledan smart set, male and female, found the eroticism acceptable; this is a further indication of the taste of Tirso's time. That at least some of the characters of the Cigarrales were living persons of the nobility has been established beyond reasonable doubt. See, for example, my “Tirso's Cigarrales de Toledo: Some Clarifications and Identifications,” Hispanic Review, 33 (July 1965), 246-72.

There came also to hand an expansion of Professor MacCurdy's article of reference in note 7: “Women and Sexual Love in the Plays of Rojas Zorrilla: Tradition and Innovation,” Hispania 62:3 (May Sept. 1979), 255-65. The article adds substantially to the author's original study.

In an article in BCom 32:1 (Spring 1980), 3-9, “El galán Castrucho: Lope in the Tradition of Bawdy,” Professor David M. Gitlitz offers a sprightly and informative comment on the subject of his title. He shows how the young Lope—El galán Castrucho is probably of 1598—pulls out all the stops and lets go with an uninhibited erotic and scatological kind of drama not often found in the Comedia. Gitlitz's article brings to mind an article of some years ago that I published in the Homenaje a Guillermo Guastavino … (Madrid: Asociación de bibliotecarios, archiveros y arqueólogos, 1974), pp. 347-60. The article, “Un breve comentario sobre dos comedias del siglo de oro,” discusses two plays, the first of which is Lope's El caballero del milagro, composed between 1593 and 1598. The play's action takes place in Rome and is a picture of low life in which all the female characters are prostitutes. It is apparent that the youthful Lope, now in his thirties and an accomplished practitioner of the bawdy and the pornographic in his own life, introduces some of these elements into plays that are yet to receive attention. Gitlitz suggests that this kind of exaggerated erotica must have suffused the life of the times to an extent still not appreciated.

Notes

1. The words are taken from the Russian critic P. N. Berkov, as recalled by Robert C. Stephenson in the latter's essay on “Farce as Method.” See Comedy, Meaning and Form, Robert W. Corrigan, ed. (Scranton, Pa.: Chandler, 1965), p. 317. The Stephenson essay was first published in Tulane Drama Review, 5:2 (1961), 85-93.

2. In his controversial Love in the Western World, first published in New York in 1940 as a Pantheon book and reprinted in 1956—the translation is by Montgomery Belgion—Denis de Rougemont traces the history of Western love as he understands it. Love as Eros, passion, often results in adultery and death, as in a model myth of the 12th and 13th centuries, that of Tristan and Iseult. It follows that for de Rougemont love is often tragic. The tragedy that springs from love is indeed a frequent motif of Western literature, but the discussion of love in the present article will take a different direction.

3. Lehman's discussion, “Comedy and Laughter,” first published in the Univ. of California Publications. English Studies, 10 (U. of Cal. Press, 1959), 81-101, was reprinted on pp. 163 ff of the volume edited by Corrigan named in note 1.

4. This is not to say that the spiritual element is necessarily lacking in the lovers' emotions; indeed, we may assume its presence to a greater or lesser degree. This “spiritualized” love, at times labeled “neo-Platonic,” is that which represents an effort to transcend physical desire. It will have comment below.

5. The moralists' disapproval of the theater resulted in its closing only twice, in 1598 and in 1646. The closings on other occasions came from other circumstances. This on the authority of N. E. Shergold in his History of the Spanish Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 522. The theater's critics were made ineffective partly by the fact that hospitals were supported by theater funds. Furthermore, the yearly performances of the autos sacramentales were staged by professionals, and these performers could not make a living unless permitted to offer other types of drama during the theatrical season. Again, the actors and actresses, in spite of a notoriously unconventional life-style, took on a degree of respectibility as the seventeenth century progressed. Shergold (p. 523) reports on the increasingly tolerant attitude of the civil authorities and the Church, as is indicated, for example, by the permission for an actors' guild in 1631. The approving document was signed by the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, and the inaugural ceremonies included a sermon by the Bishop of Vermiglin.

6. For the orthodox Jew or Christian there is often involved in the evil repute of love the doctrine of original sin. This doctrine is tied in in some fashion with the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. However, theologians through the centuries have not been able to come to a consensus about the specific nature of the act that may have caused this sin. The bibliography of the subject is formidable and is to be approached by the layman with caution. It is convenient to use the encyclopedias. One may, for example, read the Encyclopedia Americana (s.v. Original Sin) or The New Catholic Encyclopedia (s.v. Original Sin; Sex; Fall of Man). The Americana attempts an objective view, while that of the New Catholic Encyclopedia restricts itself to the Roman Catholic view of the issue.

7. MacCurdy's article is in Romance Notes, 1 (1959), 36-39.

8. Leavitt, “Strip-Tease …” in Homenaje a Rodríguez Moñino [no editors named], (Madrid, 1966), pp. 305-10.

9. Pallarés, “Algunos aspectos …,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 19:1 (1972), 3-15.

10. Asensio, “Casos de amor …,” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos, nos. 289-90 (julio-agosto, 1974), 1-33.

11. Asensio states that Tirso is not to be considered a theorist of love (“un teórico de amor”). If this means that the Mercedarian does not explicate a love theory in philosophical detail, this is of course correct. But the Tirsian idea of love as shown in the plots of his plays is quite clear, not to be mistaken. It is that love is erotic, as seen by the four scholars named.

12. As observed, Asensio faults the Counter Reformation doctrine in its rejection of neo-Platonism. Where was the individual to find salvation for his sins? Asensio makes clear his conviction that the Church and the government have the solutions for the problem of salvation in whatever way this problem might be solved. This is his solution in spite of his criticism above of the Church's lack of the capacity to formulate adequate norms because of its rejection of the neo-Platonic concept.

13. Asensio (p. 32) sees the multiple marriage device of the Comedia as a cure for the eroticism he deplores in the love of man and woman, and thus commends the churchly sacrament of marriage. The eroticism he finds objectionable is that which lacks the churchly sacrament.

14. The convent of the Victoria was close to the Calle Mayor, as doña Blanca states in a footnote to p. 1441. Ventura's remarks include the assertion that in that street love is sold “a varas, medida y peso,” and we are reminded by E. Rodríguez Solís in his Historia de la prostitución en España y América (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, [1921?], p. 115 that, according to Mesonero Romanos there was in the Calle Mayor an “asiento de una mancebía célebre, sostenido por magnates de la corte, con lonjas y tiendas de objetos de plata y oro,” and (p. 116) that it was “un lugar de citas para niñas picañas, busconas de manto y de daifas del agarro.” The less than elevated moral tone of Tirso's Spain has been so often remarked upon that it needs no extended comment here. Let the assertions of Dr. Gregorio Marañón suffice. On p. 32 of his El conde-duque de Olivares (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1952), he refers to the youthful love exploits of that gentleman who was to become the privado of Felipe IV, and remarks: “Fueron, en suma, estos tiempos de [la vida del conde-duque] de pasión desordenada y cínica, muy al uso de la época.” Again, on p. 206, Marañón refers to “la cruda fusión mística-sensual” of the spirit of the time, and goes on to suggest that the source of the attitude lay partly in the Spanish myths of the period, especially that of don Juan, “amasado en muerte y lujaria.”

15. It may also be suggested that, amusingly enough, Melchor's attitude involves an approach to neo-Platonism in that his instant infatuation is inspired by the minimum of beauty he has observed—that of the lady's hand—and from that works upward in his imagination toward a fantasized vision of the idea of beauty as one and perfect, according to Plotinus (q.v. in The Dictionary of Philosophy, Dagobert D. Runes, ed. [New York: Philosophical Library, 1960]). For the Christian neo-Platonist the supreme Beauty would be God.

16. The all-concealing clothing of the time was permitted within the church. For street wear women were required by laws passed and always ignored to uncover their faces; the laws were intended to protect the public against disreputable females and men dressed as women who had criminal activities in mind. Modern commentaries on the laws are multiple. See, e.g., the Rodríguez volume cited in note 14, p. 115 ff; also A. de León Pinelo, Anales de Madrid (Madrid: CSIC, 1971), p. 316.

    Not only could the hand serve an erotic purpose; the exposed female foot could be a fetish, an inspiration for the amorous fantasies of an admiring male. One may read the amusing and informative article on the matter by A. David Kossoff, “El pie desnudo: Cervantes y Lope,” in Homenaje a William L. Fichter, A. David Kossoff and José Amor y Vázquez, eds. (Madrid: Castalia, 1971), pp. 381-86. It may be suspected that during Spain's seventeenth century any part of the female anatomy could, when exposed, become an object of male admiration. Our play wll do its part in making this clear.

17. Angela is a little on the odd side. In Act I we are told that she disdains all men because, deploring her descent from Adam, she is upset at having as an ancestor one who had the shamelessness to appear naked before his wife. Again, having learned from Magdalena of the latter's planned marriage, she exclaims that she cannot understand how a girl can stand before a priest and a group of wedding guests and say “yes” to a man. The girl who can do this, she opines, is either libre y animosa or lacking in intelligence. Angela's budding love for Melchor has obviously changed her mind about the desirability of a husband.

18. Naughtiness adds to the dramatic effect. Virtue as a dramatic motif is colorless. Audiences feel in witnessing naughtiness a vicarious pleasure without risking their own punishment. As Valle-Inclán wrote in his Sonata de Primavera, the best part of sanctity are the temptations.

19. Comedy, as in our play, is often an escape mechanism, a “trip” into a kind of never-never land where untoward and amusing events happen and turn out as they should in an idealized world. Piquancy is added to La celosa by the probability that Tirso, as in certain other of his plays, was using it partly to tease prominent persons of the nobility. He was also perhaps recalling a scandal that had been imperfectly hushed up in the court circle. See my “La celosa de sí misma de Tirso de Molina,” in the Fichter homage volume of reference in note 16.

20. José Deleito y Piñnuela, También se divierte el pueblo (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1944).

21. A recent checking of Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera's Catálogo … del teatro antigue español (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1860) revealed 1,012 separate entries of names of playwrights who had each written one or more plays. Of these, 92 were churchmen, 12 were women (10 of them nuns). Thus, about 10 percent of the dramatists had churchly connections.

22. See Shergold, op. cit., Chaps. 1 and 2.

23. Cf. my review of José María Díez, Sociología de la comedia españols del siglo XVII (Madrid: Cátedra, 1976) in the Bulletin of the Comediantes (Spring, 1979), pp. 76-77.

24. At this point one might expatiate on the desengaño of the baroque period, the disillusionment that, among other causes, arose from two that come to mind: the uncertainty among the people as to what was or was not morally wrong and, as a corollary to this, their inability to overcome the lusts of the flesh. No space may be given here to pursue further the element of desengaño; it has had considerable discussion in the scholarly literature. The reader may choose to give thought to the matter as it arises in my article “Spain's Golden Age Culture and the Comedia,” in Hispania, 61:4 (December 1978), 832-50.

25. The popularity of the theme has meant its persistence in drama from the ancient Greeks on. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Univ. Press, 1957), p. 163, reminds us of this fact and of other fundamentals of comedy: The basis of all modern comedy is to be found in Greek New Comedy, as transmitted by Plautus and Terence. “What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition […], and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will. In the first place, the movement of comedy is usually a movement from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play the obstructing characters are in charge of the play's society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings the hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the moment this crystallization occurs is the point of the resolution of the action, the comic discovery, the anagorisis or cognitio. The appearance of this new society is frequently signalized by some kind of party or festive ritual, which either appears at the end of the play or is assumed to take place immediately afterward. Weddings are most common.” The reader will recognize La celosa's formula in the above, changed in minor ways. In passing, and in reference to Tirso's well-known Don Gil de las calzas verdes, it is recalled with amusement how in that comedia the boy-wants-girl formula has become girl-wants-boy and she gets him after removing the obstructions in her path (as Magdalena gets Melchor). And so in Don Gil it is the girl who is the “hero,” while the galán is a kind of anti-hero who is mocked. One recognizes that Melchor of La celosa has a narrow escape from mockery (if he escapes at all), and that Tirso is, in his own way, calling into question the machismo of the Spanish male of his time. (In El burlador de Sevilla Don Juan's machismo sends him to Hell.)

    A colleague who graciously took time from a busy schedule to read the present article agreed on the whole with its conclusions, but wondered to what extent Tirso regarded his Melchor as a ninny worthy only of mockery. The consultant sees in Melchor's idée fixe toward the convent lady's hand the kind of rigidity that Bergson regarded as the essence of the comic personality. In my reply I acknowledged the consultant's penetrating assessment of Melchor's character, even though my agreement with the assessment is not complete. Melchor is indeed not very bright. I also suggested that Melchor represents Tirso's liking for the weak male, one dominated by his female antagonist, as recalled just above in my reference to Don Gil. I also recalled that some years ago I proposed the possibility that perhaps Tirso was expressing his belief that the Spanish male of the century was sufficiently enslaved by his obsession with sex that he (Tirso) may have seen Spain as governed from the bedroom. In any event, different readers may see different things in La celosa just as they make variant interpretations of any piece of literature. One may pointedly recall Emile Zola's remark that “a work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.”